


The Librarians are Plotting the Revolution

by kikiduck



Category: American Idol
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Librarians, Libraries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-07
Updated: 2011-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-21 02:52:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,937
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kikiduck/pseuds/kikiduck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The excitement started about a month into summer break, when a group of concerned citizens from a radical church challenged some of the books on the shelf in our teen area. By the time it was all over, they had flooded the library with phone calls and e-mails about the books, the suggestions on our booklists and website, and personally attacked our teen librarian via e-mail and at library board meeting. It was a pretty crazy summer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Librarians are Plotting the Revolution

_"I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. ... You think they're just sitting at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like, plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them. You know, they've had their budgets cut. They're paid nothing. Books are falling apart. The libraries are just like the ass end of everything, right?" -- Michael Moore_

 

The excitement started about a month into summer break, when a group of concerned citizens from a radical church challenged some of the books on the shelf in our teen area. By the time it was all over, they had flooded the library with phone calls and e-mails about the books, the suggestions on our booklists and website, and personally attacked our teen librarian via e-mail and at library board meeting. It was a pretty crazy summer.

I had started at the beginning of the summer, fresh out of graduate school, the ink barely dry on my newly minted degree. Public libraries weren't exactly my first choice for a career path, but I couldn't argue with a steady paycheck until I figured out what I really wanted to do. Also, my wife had told me that "You need to get a job. A real job. Sitting around thinking about things on the Internet is not a job."

I had said something about maybe getting my Ph.D, and she said something about murdering me while I slept. So, I got a job. The Franklin Public Library happened to be the first one that was offered to me, and now I got paid to babysit out of control teenagers and confused seniors. As a special bonus, I got to work with the most dysfunctional bunch of people I’d ever come across, and I spent more than my fair share of time on university campuses.

For instance, Anoop Desai was the other reference librarian on our floor. He had three degrees, was considering a fourth, and was obsessed with the reference collection. On my first day, after Ryan Seacrest had deposited me in the second floor work room and sprinted back up to his office in Human Resources — Ryan liked to keep his heart rate elevated so he could burn more calories — Anoop’s first words to me were “I realize we both have reference librarian in our job title, but when it comes to collection development, I am responsible for the actual reference collection." This was the librarian equivalent of peeing on your territory, since you can’t actually pee on books without ruining them.

Everyone had their own little favorite collections that they’d staked out over the years. Since I was the new guy, I got stuck with the last third of the non-fiction collection and the magazines, also known as the stuff no one else wanted. I don't know why, since the magazines were actually really easy. The second floor clerk did most of the magazine work anyway.

The clerk's name was David, but everyone called him Archie. I asked him why once and he stammered out an answer along the lines of “Oh man, it’s because there were like, two Davids downstairs in circulation, plus Danny, and it was really confusing, so everyone just called me Archie. I don’t mind.” And then he smiled at me a little too enthusiastically, like he was trying to convince me that he really didn’t mind.

Archie was, quite frankly, a little weird. He was still in high school and only worked a couple afternoons after school and on Saturday mornings. He wore headphones when he was working, unless he realized someone was talking directly to him, and sometimes he sang along quietly to whatever he was listening to. If someone caught him singing along, he usually stopped and blushed and said something like, “Gosh, I really like this album.”

Really, he said gosh. Like Opie Taylor. “Such a little weirdo.” Anoop said one afternoon after Archie headed out to the public floor with a cart of fiction to be reshelved.

“Aww.” Adam said. “I think he’s sweet. I was weird in high school too, and look at me now.”

Adam was our teen librarian. When I first met him, I thought he was going to be one of those obnoxious fully grown adults who try to prove they're teenager's best friends by dressing like them and listening to their music. Like any teenager in their right mind would be fooled into thinking an adult trying really hard to act cool actually was. I haven't ever told Adam about my first impression, but I should, because he would think it was hilarious.

 

\-----

The patrons were crazy too. My first day, Anoop had left me by myself at the reference desk. I think it had been some kind of twisted initiation ritual, where if I survived, I was allowed to stay. He told me to call the work room if I needed anything, and then disappeared.

Of course, I didn't know how to call the work room on the phone, but the door was only ten feet away, I could probably just stick my head inside and call him the old-fashioned way if I had to.

A blind guy with crazy maestro hair and an actual red tipped cane had approached the desk after Anoop left. "I need to reserve the study room."

"Oh." I said. I hadn't even known there was a study room.

"You're new." The blind guy told me.

"Yeah." I started to get out of my chair. "Let me go get..."

"There's a notebook." The blind guy offered helpfully. "It's in that drawer to your right. The top one, I think."

I opened the top drawer, and there was a monthly planner notebook. It even had a label on the front that said Study Room, written in neat, careful block letters.

"You just have to write my name and how long I want it. I'm Scott."

This was a really great start to my career, with the blind patron telling me what I should be doing. Really fantastic. Clearly I needed to demand a tuition refund.

I scanned the days already booked for the month. Scott was written in on every Monday morning. "Until two o'clock?" I asked, since all the other Mondays were booked from ten until two.

"How did you know that?" Scott asked suspiciously.

"Um... the other days on the calendar all say two o'clock."

Scott cackled loudly, causing half of the group of patrons at the computers to turn at look at us. The rest were too busy typing furiously to bother with looking up. "Oh man!" Scott said. "I thought maybe you were psychic!"

Anoop came back out to the desk later that morning. He didn't seem pleased that I was still there, but he didn't seem disappointed either.

Paula was tiny, with big, elaborately styled hair, strappy heels and a low cut, flamingo pink dress. She leaned across the reference desk, grabbed my face with both hands, and tried her best to squish it like a pillow. My face wasn't really intended for that. "Look at you!" She cooed. "You're the cutest thing I've ever seen!"

"Yeah..." I tried to pull my cute face free, but it was harder to break loose than I had expected. She had a good grip. I could see one of her acrylic nails out of my peripheral vision, and it was uncomfortably close to being in my eye socket.

Anoop watched the entire exchange with something similar to interest, but made no move to interfere.

"Isn't he adorable?" She said to Anoop, who just raised his eyebrows and took another sip of coffee from his mug. I hoped this wasn't also part of the secret initiation ritual.

She finally released my face, smiled and patted my cheek, and then gathered her bags and headed for the chairs near the windows. I straightened my shirt and tried to make sure my jaw still worked.

Anoop stared at me solemnly. "That was Paula. We're not sure what's up with her, but she's harmless." He paused for a moment. "Although, I've never seen her do that before."

\-----

I suppose the first indicator that there were going to be problems this summer was when a mother came in to the library towards the end of June. Adam and I were manning the reference desk on the second floor, and she walked up to me and flung a paperback teen novel on the desk. "Do you know what this is?" She asked me.

Of course, the first answer that came to mind was a book, but that was clearly the wrong thing to say, so I waited to see what she said next.

"My daughter checked this book out because this library recommended it." She stabbed the front of the book with her index finger for emphasis. The book was called Rainbow Party and it had a collection of lipstick tubes in rainbow colors on the front cover. If I were to judge this book by the cover, there was going to be some rainbow colored sexiness inside; probably at a party.

"Oh." I said, glancing over at Adam, who had stopped writing an e-mail and was watching the woman while pretending not to. "We did?"

"You should put a warning label on it. This is not appropriate for teenagers to read."

Curiosity got the better of Adam and he moved over next to me and picked up the book. "Someone here recommended this book to your daughter?" He asked.

"She picked it up from one of your displays." The woman said displays like it was a dirty word.

"Oh,” Adam said. "On one of the shelves?"

"I don't know." The woman managed to sound even more annoyed. "It doesn't really matter where she got it, you shouldn't be recommending books like that to teenagers."

When I got to work the next morning, Adam was already sitting at his desk, reading Rainbow Party.

"So?" I asked. "Is it inappropriate?"

Adam sighed. "Probably, but mostly it's just terrible. Why did I buy this in the first place?"

"Standing purchase order?"

Adam shook his head. "I know I would have never suggested this to anyone. I can think of three other books about teenagers having sex that are better than this one, right off the top of my head."

"It's about teenagers having sex?" I raised my eyebrows.

Adam held the book up and pointed at the title. "Apparently rainbow parties are when each girl wears a different color lipstick, and then they go down on each guy, and by the end of the night each guy has a 'rainbow' down there."

"That... actually sounds pretty inappropriate."

"And then because they really wrote this book to educate, there's some heavy-handed lecturing on STDs, and then everyone gets gonorrhea!" Adam finished.

Anoop walked through the doorway into the work room halfway through Adam's explanation, the expression on his face clearly saying he really wished he had picked another time to walk through that door.

\------

A few days later, another mother showed up at the reference desk and asked Anoop about the themed book lists Adam had on display in the teen area, and on the teen page of the library website. The lists so far included the standard genres like romances, humor, classics, and historical fiction, plus some others around themes like girl power, GLBT, and vampires. He periodically added new lists, usually when we started getting more requests than usual for a topic. Vampires had been popular lately, and it was nice for the rest of us at the reference desk to have something to refer to when teenagers wanted another vampire book, or needed historical fiction for a school project.

"Who creates these lists?" The woman asked him. She had a copy of each list in her hand.

"All of our booklists are created by the librarians who work here." Anoop explained. "The lists for the teen books are usually created by our teen librarian."

"And how does she decide what books end up on the list?"

"I can't tell you exactly, but it's probably a combination of books he's read and books that were well reviewed by Library Journal or the American Library Association."

"And what about the book group?"

Anoop paused. "What about it?"

"How does he pick the books for that?"

"That, I don't know." Anoop fished around in the reference desk drawer for the business card holder. "I can give you our teen librarian's card; you can follow up with him if you want."

The business card holder didn’t do a very good job. I could spend ten minutes organizing all the cards into the little slots, and then as soon as I closed the drawer, it fell over and they all fell out again. Usually we just pawed through the pile until we found the right name.

The only cards anyone ever wanted were for Kara or Adam anyway. It's not like anyone was interested in following up with the rest of us.

The woman took the card and left, and Anoop turned to me. "Is it just me, or have we been getting a lot of concerned parents lately?"

"It's not just you." I confirmed. "And what do you mean you don't know how Adam picks the book group books?" He had seen Adam's selection process even more than I had. If someone asked Adam, he would say the teens in the group picked what books to read, but there was usually some serious influence from the teen librarian about some amazing book he had just read. Adam usually read at least two "amazing" books a month. I thought his enthusiasm for any particular title should probably be taken with a grain of salt.

Anoop smiled. "Okay, maybe I did know. I was tired of getting interrogated."

The phone at the desk rang, and I picked it up before Anoop. "Oh man!" Megan said. "I wanted Anoop to answer!"

Megan was the children's librarian. We didn't see her very often, since she worked in the children's room on the first floor, but we talked to her on the phone a lot. She enjoyed calling the reference phone from downstairs, and when Anoop answered, disguising her voice and asking him weird reference questions. The only thing that stopped Anoop from hanging up on her was the slight possibility that one time it would be an actual person calling with a weird question.

\-----

Allison came into the library every day after school, until 6:00 or so, when her parents get home from work and she could get into her house. Or, at least that’s what Adam told me. According to Allison, her parents thought she spent her afternoons at the library doing homework, but I never saw her doing anything remotely resembling homework. Well, sometimes she held a book in her hand. I’m not sure if she did her homework some other time, or if she just didn’t do it, period.

When Allison had used up her daily allotment of time on the computers, she wandered around the teen area looking bored, and eventually made her way over to the reference desk to kill time by annoying whoever was out there that hour.

On the days Adam was in the building, he usually put her to work adding stickers to spine labels or updating the library’s MySpace page. Once he even got her to sit down and read a book, under the pretense of needing her opinion on it. I think she caught on to him though, because he hadn’t been able to pull that one off again.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that Allison had a crush on Adam. Maybe it made me a bad person, but it only took me a week or so to learn how to exploit this to my advantage. It turned out Allison would do almost anything I asked as long as I prefaced the request with "You know, Adam really needed some help with..." I managed to get her to put the teen comic books in order, shelf read half of the teen fiction, and write five reviews for the library's MySpace page.

Allison came in one afternoon with bright cherry red hair. Delighted didn’t really even begin to cover Adam's reaction. "Oh my god."

"I know, right?" Allison tossed her hair and twirled around.

"Oh my god." Adam repeated. "That is bitchin'. So rockstar." He lifted the top layers up to look at the purple streaks halfway through. "Did you do this yourself?"

Allison made an are-you-crazy face at Adam. “No! A friend of my sisters did it.”

When Archie arrived for his shift an hour later, Adam stopped him. "Hey, did you see Allison's hair?"

"Oh yeah!" Archie said in a weirdly enthusiastic voice. "It's really pretty!" He seemed to think about what he just said for a moment, then added in a more normal tone, “It’s pretty cool, you know?”

“You should come to book club next week.” Adam said. "I think you'd like the book."

“Oh, I don’t know.” Archie shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other. “I mean, I don’t really read… I mean, I do, but not like… I don’t know. Gosh.”

“You go to the same school as Allison, right?” Adam asked.

Archie blushed. “Yeah. She’s in my class. One of my classes. My history class, actually. She’s pretty scary.”

I couldn't help laughing at this, but Archie didn't seem to notice.

“She’s not scary!” Adam protested.

“Yeah, she is.” Archie said. “She’s loud and kind of crazy and one time she knocked me over in the hallway.”

Judging from Adam's face, this was the best thing anyone had said to him all week.

“She could probably beat me up if she wanted to.” Archie finished.

Adam was actually speechless for several seconds. I had to put my head down my desk so I wouldn't start laughing again. At this point, I honestly wasn't sure which was funnier, Archie's story about how Allison knocked him down, or Adam trying to figure out what to say next.

"Well, no one gets to beat up anyone else at book club." Adam said finally. "That's a different club entirely."

This was a reference that sailed way, way over Archie's head.

"Aren't you guys reading that playlist book you made me read last week?" I asked Adam after Archie went back out on the floor with his magazine cart.

"Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist!" Adam said. "I think he'd like it. He's all into music, and apparently girls who can beat him up. Oh my god, how cute would the two of them be?"

I knew what the title was, it was just really long to say. "Yeah, but do you remember how much swearing is in that book? Archie says 'gosh' and 'heck.'"

"Jesus." Adam rolled his eyes. "Like it isn't anything he doesn't hear at school already."

 

\-----

Danny tracked me down at lunch after the fourth of July. I had actually started switching my lunch break times with Adam just to avoid this scenario. Adam didn’t have to worry about having conversations with Danny in the break room, since Danny usually ignored him. I wasn’t that lucky.

I shouldn't be so mean about it. Danny probably meant well, it's just that he was a little weird, and I didn’t really want to spend my lunch break fending off invitations to visit his church.

"So, Kris." He said casually, while sticking his frozen dinner tray into the microwave. "I hear there've been a lot of concerned parents upstairs lately."

I shrugged and pretended to be very interested in my book, which I wasn't really interested in at all. "I don't know." Then my curiosity got the better of me. "Where'd you hear that?"

"Matt."

Of course. If you wanted everyone in the building to know something within the space of eight hours, you’d just tell Matt from IT.

"So?" Danny asked again. "What's Adam doing about it?" Danny had a weird little smirk on his face when he said this, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was happy over the idea of Adam having to deal with parent's questions, or if it was just Danny being weird again.

\-----

My first encounter with Danny Gokey was on my third day, when I was sent downstairs to obtain office supplies for my workspace. Danny unlocked a beige cabinet with enough ceremony to suggest he was a little too proud of having the key on his keyring than was strictly necessary for office supplies, and doled out five pencils, three pens, a tape dispenser, a stapler and two notebooks. “These are all you get until the next quarter.” He informed me solemnly. “Whatever you do, don’t leave them out on the desk where the patrons can access them, because they will take the pencils and we’ll never get them back.”

It seemed like the patrons should be able to take the pencils if they wanted to, since their tax dollars paid for them in the first place, but I could already tell from the flourish as he unlocked his precious cabinet of office supplies, this was not the time to raise that argument.

When I shared this exchange with Adam fifteen minutes later — it seemed like the sort of thing he would find entertaining — Adam rolled his eyes. “Oh god. The patrons don’t even take his precious pencils, we’ve been stealing them from the circulation desk for months. He doesn’t work on Tuesday mornings, that’s the best time to do it.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of this. “You steal the pencils from the circ desk when he’s not here?”

Adam nodded. “Also, I stole the circ desk stapler about six months ago. I peeled the little label off that said “circ desk” so my tracks were covered. You’ll notice now that he’s actually chained the stapler to the desk.”

“You must be proud.” I said.

“A little bit.” Adam admitted.

It wasn’t just his weird hoarding of the library’s office supplies. He ruled with an iron fist over the patron’s circulation records too. Danny didn’t believe in waiving fines, because those people were just trying to scam the library out of seventy five cents. He put blocking notes on records when patrons returned items in the wrong bookdrop, or didn’t put their videotapes back in the cases the right way. Lil ran across a note once on a patron’s record that they “smelled drunk” when they checked out their items and we should keep an eye on them. Kara knew about the notes, but hadn’t had time to do anything about it, since she was writing her sophomore novel.

Within the first week, Danny had latched on to me as a fellow Christian. I’m not sure exactly what that was supposed to imply, since I’m pretty sure that our views on Christianity were about as similar as our views on patrons using the pencils. I probably should have shut him down the first time obliquely referenced our “similarities” but I didn’t, and he took silence as permission to share any potentially sinful information about coworkers or patrons with me.

I was downstairs in the lobby one afternoon, waiting for Megan, who was supposed to have a children’s nonfiction purchase list for me, when Danny approached me in his usual awkwardly cocky way. “You know,” he said to me. “I’m glad you’re working Saturday mornings now.”

Yeah. Boy, there’s nothing quite as excellent as having to work weekends. “Oh?” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t phrased it as a question, because that was just going to invite him to continue, and I was pretty sure that I didn’t want him to.

“Before, when your position was still open, it was just Adam and Archie upstairs on Saturday mornings.” Danny explained.

“Well, Saturday mornings are usually pretty quiet.” I said. “It’s the afternoon when it gets kind of crazy.”

“No,” Danny said. “I meant more that Archie was alone up there with Adam.”

I frowned. “Wait, what?”

“You know.” Danny raised his eyebrows.

I thought about this for a minute. Did Adam and Archie have some kind of longstanding feud? I hadn't ever noticed, but between the two of them, it might be hard to tell. No, that couldn’t be it, neither one of them were capable of actually feuding with someone else. They’d forget and be all nice and excited. And sure, Adam could be kind of intense, but it didn’t seem like Archie was scared of Adam. Or any more scared of him than he was of anything else, including the copy machine and when the staff door closed behind him too loudly.

“No, I don’t think I do know what you mean.” I said to Danny.

“Well, you know.” Danny said again, with the suggestive eyebrow raise again. “I mean, you know how Adam is, right? I just worry about Archie being left alone with him like that.”

Okay. Never mind that for eight hours of the day, the general public was also on the second floor, and if Adam was the only librarian on duty, their paths would probably never cross the entire day, but Archie shouldn’t be upstairs alone with Adam because Adam was, you know… a serial killer. Because you know… he was a sex offender. Because you know… oh.

\-----

“So you figured out that Adam's gay?” Katy said to me. "How? Did he hit on you?"

"No." I said firmly.

"Gay guys always hit on you." Katy explained. "Probably because you're adorable and they can tell you exfoliate."

Where did she come up with this stuff? I frowned. “You know I only do that because I like the tingly feeling.”

\-----

I was late to work on Monday, mostly because it was Monday, and because it was raining. It's not like I had a long commute or anything, but it seemed like everything always moved slower when it rained during the summer.

Kara was actually at work and in her office when I got there, which was surprising enough all on it's own, but she had Adam in there with her, which was even more surprising since it meant she was actually doing something library-related and not novel-related.

When Adam came back out to his desk ten minutes later, he was clutching a piece of paper, and almost jumping up and down he was so excited. "I have a book challenge!" He announced. "Oh my god, this is awesome."

"Like a program?" I was confused.

Adam scrunched his face at me. "What? No, like someone actually printed the Reconsideration of Library Materials form off the website and challenged one of my books! They want us to put it in the adult fiction section."

Right. That's what it had sounded like, but I don’t know, it seemed like excitement wasn’t the appropriate reaction to news like that. Unless you were Adam, I suppose.

"So what do you have to do now?"

"I have to write a letter!" He said it with the same enthusiasm he had used for announcing the challenge in the first place, and then we both started laughing, because no one should be that excited about writing a letter, ever.

Adam took the entire day to write his letter. This was mostly because he didn’t just sit down at his desk and write a response. He sat at his desk for five minutes and then spent the rest of the hour wandering around the library, talking to people, or sitting at the desk talking about how he needed to write the rest of the letter, then he’d wander back to the work room and write another sentence before repeating the entire process again. I knew it was just his process for working through something, but it was actually exhausting to watch.

That afternoon, Adam was still supposedly writing his letter. Lil and I were in the middle of a quiet hour on the reference desk when Archie approached us nervously. He was almost wringing his hands.

"What do you need, sweetie?" Lil asked.

"Um." Archie said. "Oh my gosh. There's a guy over there." He half-flapped one of his hands in the direction of the row of computers. "Um. This guy. He's sitting over there, and he's looking at some stuff. On the computer. You know, like, um, inappropriate stuff."

Lil and I exchanged looks. "David," I said. "You know as long as it's not illegal, we don't police what anyone's looking at, right?"

"Oh yeah." Archie nodded, and now he really was wringing his hands. "I know that. But, um, it's just that, he's not really, um, it's that he's not... inside his pants." He said the last part all in a rush and managed to look even more awkward than before.

Nice. I turned to Lil, because honestly? What's the correct response to something like that? Lil folded her arms across her chest. "Oh, hell no. I've got this one."

That was actually a really good response.

The work room door opened and Adam came back out onto the floor just in time to hear Lil's voice raised loud enough to be clearly heard across the entire floor. "What I'm saying is you need to zip it back up and leave the building immediately."

Adam's face was priceless, like a hybrid of surprise and delight. "Oh my god." He mouthed at me. "What did I miss?"

"Sir," Lil's voice carried over to the reference desk again. "If you don't, I'm going to call the police."

"Gosh." Archie said.

\-----

By the end of the week, there had been challenge forms turned in for over seventy books in the teen collection. Adam's excitement had been tempered slightly, something I think had less to do with realizing the potential seriousness of the situation, and more to do with realizing that now he was going to have to write seventy of those response letters.

Kara, on the other hand, was officially freaking out. That's how we all ended up in the meeting room on the fourth floor Friday morning. Well, everyone except for Lil, who volunteered to work at the reference desk instead. Megan even came up from the children's room.

Simon arrived fifteen minutes late, with Randy and Ryan Seacrest from Human Resources in tow. It seemed like Ryan spend half of his time doing Human Resources related tasks, and the rest of his time acting as Simon's personal assistant.

"So." Simon said, seating himself at the head of the conference table. "Exactly how many titles were challenged here?"

"Seventy seven." Adam said. "They're mostly from our GLBT teen booklist, and then from the related subject headings."

"But, at least that means someone knows how to do a subject search in the catalog." Anoop offered helpfully.

"Yay, bibliographic instruction!" I added. Simon looked at both of us like we’d each grown an extra head.

Megan took Anoop's pen and started to draw daises in the margin of his notepad. Anoop arrived at every meeting prepared to take notes. The rest of us weren’t so organized.

"So let me see if I understand this correctly." Simon said. "We have seventy seven challenges to our collection because some community group thinks you're inflicting your gay agenda on their children?"

"Apparently." Adam shrugged.

"Whoa." Ryan interrupted. "Simon, I don't think we want to start..."

Simon rolled his eyes. "Oh come on. Like everyone here doesn't know he's gay."

"Wait," Adam said. "Who's gay?"

Ryan looked horrified.

\-----

When Simon Cowell descended from his office on the fourth floor and visited the lowly peons in the rest of the library, he usually announced his arrival by standing just inside the lobby doors and folding his arms across his chest. Then he surveyed the entire floor with an expression that implied it smells bad and he’s just waiting to see whose fault it is.

Actually, there was a pretty good chance it did smell bad on the second floor, since it was a public library. It was hard to tell, since the rest of us were used to the smell of unwashed library patron.

Then, Simon usually messed with our heads. As Riverside City Librarian, and acting director of the city’s three libraries, it was in his job description to make us second guess every choice we made in the last week. If we looked up at the reference desk and waited to see what he wanted, he asked why we weren’t working. If we ignored him when he walked in, and kept working, he told us it was “very poor customer service. Quite awful, really.”

“He just likes fucking with our heads.” Adam had shrugged it off after Simon announced, after a brief walk through the teen and fiction areas, that he didn’t want to see any books on display, because it made the library look cluttered.

“I’ll fuck with his head.” Lil grumbled at the next desk. I think she meant it in a way that involved physical violence. Lil and Simon had a long, not so pleasant history that had culminated in his not promoting her to library manager. This had all happened shortly before I started working at Franklin, but I had heard about it several times already. If you wanted to start a conversation in the work room, you’d just mention Simon Cowell.

Instead of promoting Lil, who had five years experience at Franklin and years of prior experience at multiple busy city libraries, Simon had hired Kara, who was less interested in managing a library than she was in her budding chick lit romance novel career. Her debut novel was titled “No Boundaries” and a poster-sized version of the cover was framed on her office wall.

“Kris, you know why he didn’t hire me.” Lil had said to me the third or fourth time I had heard the story. Then she gathered the draft schedule she was working on since Kara wasn’t any good at scheduling, and headed out to the reference desk without explaining why.

Adam was at his desk and Anoop had just returned from lunch, Matt from IT following after him, as usual. “Why?” I asked. “Why didn’t he hire her?”

“Because he’s threatened by a successful black woman?” This was Matt’s suggestion, and Adam and I both turned to look at each other.

“Whaaaat?” Adam said skeptically. He raised his eyebrows at Anoop. “Do you think that’s what it is?”

“You realize I’m not black, right?” Anoop said, deadpan. Matt cackled in approval.

“Fuck you.” Adam retorted. “See if I ever try to include you in a conversation again.”

“If only.” Anoop sighed, sitting down at his desk. Matt perched on the corner of the desk, reading what was on the computer screen over Anoop’s shoulder.

“I think he didn’t hire her because she’s been the president of the city employees union since she started working here, she stands up to Simon in meetings, and she made him look bad that one time at the board meeting.” Adam said. “Or maybe it’s because she’s black.”

“And because Kara’s hot.” Matt finished. Trust Matt to up the inappropriateness of a conversation exponentially. “You all know what I’m doing if Simon ever tries anything with me.” He patted the front pocket of his jacket reassuringly. “I’ve got my resignation letter right here in my pocket, all ready to go. He goes too far with me, I’m going to whip this baby out and sign it. I’m just waiting for him to try something.”

This seemed a little too Milton from Office Space to me, but who was I to judge the behavior of someone who actually had an office in the basement of the library?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Adam said absently. “You’re going to burn the building down, Milton.” This clearly wasn’t the first time he had heard Matt’s plan.

“You make fun of me now, but you won’t be laughing when Simon comes after you and you don’t have a plan.” Matt informed him.

Adam shrugged. “I have a plan. Simon’s gone back upstairs, I’m going to go put my books back on display.” He picked up the pile of young adult titles Simon had pulled from the shelves and dumped ceremoniously in the back room.

This was exciting. Anoop actually looked up from his computer monitor, not quite curious, but definitely interested enough to pay attention. It never would have occurred to me to openly defy my boss’ orders, especially over something as unimportant as books displayed on the end of shelves, but I wasn’t Adam Lambert.

After working with Adam for a few weeks, I had realized that he just liked being provocative. He liked swearing in a staff meeting and then pretending it had just slipped out. Or saying something too loudly at the reference desk so everyone on the second floor turned to look at him. The hair and clothes were mostly for the skeptical looks he got from parents during library programs and the disparaging comments from Simon. Once, Simon had called Adam’s jacket “too theatrical” and Adam had responded with, “I think it’s just the right amount of theatrical.”

Simon had actually laughed at this, and it had thrown me for the entire rest of the day. It was unnatural, like astroturf on an outdoor field, or seeing a dachshund with a bad back on one of those little wheely carts.

Adam had put the books back on display in the teen section. The next day, Randy Jackson came down to the second floor and commented on how nice all the displayed books looked, and he thought that was a great idea.

Randy was the assistant city librarian, and other than publishing rambly, nonsensical blog posts on the library website, I’m not sure exactly what he did. He usually wore flashy, dramatic outfits, but in a completely different way than Adam. Randy would wear a bright yellow argyle sweater with pin striped pants. Like a swing dancer had suddenly decided to go golfing.

Randy and Kara had interviewed me when I applied for the reference librarian position at Franklin. Randy had spent half the time in the interview going off on tangents about his own work experiences in between asking me questions. Then he had called me “dawg.” Kara, at least, had managed to stay on topic, but kept using catchphrases like “community outreach” and “defining standards of excellence” in sentences where they didn’t really belong.

It had been a pretty weird interview.

 

\-----

"Oh, fuck me." Adam said on Saturday when he sat down at his desk. Archie looked worried, like he always does when Adam swore, like he was expecting something terrible to happen. Like maybe God would strike us all down on the spot with a lightning bolt. Archie probably stopped holding onto anything metal, just in case.

"Um, no thanks." I said, like I always did, and Adam didn't even react, which wasn't a good sign. "What?"

"They found my e-mail address." Adam pulled his computer monitor around towards me, but it still wasn't close enough for me to read his e-mail, so I got up and stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. That week, he had a patch of blue hair on the top of his head.

Adam never deleted anything from his inbox, so there were a lot of messages in the first place. His total inbox count was well over 5,000. But he was right, there were close to fifty messages from different names, all about the book challenges and the lists on the website.

He scrolled through the messages quickly.

“What’s next? Playboys displayed at the check out counter?”

“It’s people like you that make me realize how far our society has fallen. You are influencing young minds with the blatant promotion of your sexually corrupt lifestyle. The power your twisted influence has must be intoxicating. You’re going to burn in Hell if you don’t repent.”

“I can’t believe you would put something like this on your website — it’s disgusting.”

“I pray for people like you. You should use your gifts and abilities to set them on the right path towards a decent life. That is the reason God gave those gifts to you.”

"Get back in the CLOSET, where YOU BELONG."

Curiosity got the better of Archie, and he hovered close enough to read the messages, but still far enough away to escape any lightning bolts. "Gosh." He said. "That's so rude."

\-----

When Archie came into the workroom Wednesday afternoon, he was actually wheezing, like he had just ran up the stairs. "Gosh," he said by way of greeting. Then he paused to breathe for several seconds.

"Exciting day?" I asked.

Archie took another deep breath. "Oh my heck, there are people protesting outside."

"About what?" Anoop asked.

Adam and I both frowned at him. "What do you think they're protesting about?" Adam said, waving the stack of challenge forms in the air.

"They have signs." Archie continued. "And they're waving them around like this." He waved his arm in the air to demonstrate.

\-----

 

The library board of trustees was responsible for overseeing Simon. I was pretty sure they didn't pay very much attention to how he ran things, and even if they had, Simon probably wouldn't have cared what they thought. Still, they met every month to approve budget related items and hear reports from staff on what was happening in the library, and the meetings were open to the public. No one usually came, except for a few crazy regulars who always had a public comment on the same issue, like the sink in the men's room not having hot enough water, or why the library wasn't open until 9:00 on Sundays.

"We know there will be people at the board meeting this month." Kara told us the Monday before. "Randy has been getting questions from local media too, so I'm expecting them to be there. Adam, I want you there and ready to answer questions."

Adam raised his eyebrows. "What do you mean, answer questions? I'm not going to be able to defend every book purchase I've made. Some of these were even before I started working here."

Kara waved her hand in the air dismissively. "No, not every book. Just you know, generally. Our policy or whatever we have." Lil buzzed the phone in the back room to announce a phone call for Kara, and she headed back into her office, closing the door behind her.

"You know." I said to Adam. "Our policy or whatever. It's not that important."

Adam sighed and did something that was similar to running his hands through his hair, but stopped short of actually messing his hair up. "Oh my god, this is getting completely out of control. You know, I didn't want any of this to happen."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh come on. You did too." I didn't buy it for a minute, Adam thrived on drama. He had been waiting for this meeting ever since he graduated from school.

"Okay." Adam amended. "Maybe, but I really didn't mean for it to get this out of control. There were protestors at my apartment last week. I think they followed me home. My brother threw fruit at them."

I can't help laughing at that, because if anyone was born to throw fruit at people he disagreed with, it was Neil Lambert. "What was your brother doing there?"

"Oh, he got evicted, he has no job, woe is his life, so now he's sleeping on my couch, and throwing my fruit out my window. I'm going to kill him if he doesn't move out soon."

\-----

I had met Adam's younger brother Neil when I had first started working at Franklin. Adam had invited me to a karaoke bar after work one evening. I think it was a birthday celebration or something. Or it might have just been because everyone really liked karaoke.

In addition to Adam; Anoop, Megan, Lil and Matt had come along, plus Neil, the only one who didn't work at the library.

"No, I don't work at the library." Neil said when I asked. "In fact, I was laid off last month, so I don't work anywhere."

"Jesus." Adam said. "Will you fucking get over it already? It was just a job. Get another one."

"Excuse me," Neil retorted. "It was not just a job. My entire identity is fundamentally changed. Before, I was a journalist. I kept the public informed. What is a democracy without an informed public? Also, I could pull off a fedora and those little pocket-sized notebooks. Now I'm just a guy with a bunch of dumb hats and no job, watching Glenn Beck destroy the very foundations of our once proud democracy."

"You've never been able to pull off a fedora." Adam said.

Around this time, Matt had dared Anoop to sing Like a Virgin, and Anoop had done it. Much to my surprise, it wasn't half bad.

"Guys, why don't we ever invite Danny?" Matt wondered. "He sings."

"Oh, no." Lil said firmly. "You invite Danny and I'm not coming."

"What?" Matt said. "He's not that bad."

Neil and I avoided the microphone. I wasn't really sure I was ready to make a fool of myself in front of new co-workers yet, and Neil insisted he was still recovering from the fruit chucked at him the last time. He said it in a way that implied everyone should protest and tell him it wasn't that bad, but no one did, and Neil didn't seem surprised.

"I can't believe my life has come to this." Neil said, slumping even slower in his seat, practically laying across the table at this point. "The highlight of my week is watching my brother cover the Stones in a karaoke bar."

It might have been the highlight of my week too. Adam was pretty good at karaoke, definitely the best I'd seen that night. He could actually sing, plus he was kind of hypnotic to watch. It was a little bit uncomfortable, actually... but in a good way.

"Are you going to drink that?" Neil asked, pointing at my not quite empty glass of beer, and when I didn't answer quickly enough, he drained it, then burped loudly.

\-----

The board meeting was in the big meeting room on the first floor. There were tables set up at the front of the room for the board members and administration, and a couple rows of chairs set out for the public. Ten minutes before the official start of the meeting, there were clearly more people then there were chairs, and Ryan jumped up and jogged over to the closet to pull out more chairs.

Kara was at the front of the room, talking to Randy. She didn't have a chair at the front table, but she had set her self up in the first row. Adam hadn't come downstairs yet, but Anoop and Megan and I were all waiting in the back of the room and were planning on staying. I didn't see anyone who looked like local media. No cameras, no tape recorders, no notebooks.

Neil showed up a few minutes later. Adam came in the door behind him, and gave me an exaggerated eye roll when he spotted Neil.

"Ah, American democracy at work." Neil rubbed his hands together gleefully, surveying the crowd in the room.

Adam shrugged at us. "When he heard there was an opportunity for public comment, he insisting on coming."

"How goes the war against Glenn Beck?" Anoop said to Neil by way of greeting.

"You know," Neil said. "The man has written a book. God only knows what lunatic rantings are inside, but if he has a book, then he'll probably have a book tour. I think if I plan in advance, when he's visiting a B. Dalton or a Borders, I can jury rig one of the shelves to topple over on him during his signing, effectively destroying him."

"Wow." Anoop said, deadpan. "That sounds like a foolproof plan."

"Where's this 'local media,' anyway?" Neil twisted around, scanning the crowd.

"Adam, thank god you're here." Kara grabbed him by the arm. "I want you to meet Lydia from the Riverside Gazette." She introduced him to a tiny middle aged woman with glasses hanging on a string of beads around her neck.

Fifteen minutes after the meeting was supposed to start, Simon stood up and waved his arm at the crowd. "Hello there!" He called. "If everyone could just take their seats and be quiet, we'll get started with things shortly. Excuse me, please be quiet." When most, but not all of the room has quieted down, Simon just started the meeting and talked over the rest of them until they sat down and paid attention.

"The local media." Neil scoffed in my ear. "The Riverside Gazette is that free shopper's weekly that's in that stand outside the supermarket."

"It looks like there's a long list for public comments tonight, so let's just get the financial business out of the way first." Simon said. He was probably doing it that way on purpose, to make everyone wait before they could start ranting.

"Boy, I bet Lydia's written a few riveting exposes on that creepy guy with curtains across his van windows at the flea market." Neil continued. I stifled a laugh.

The first woman stood up at the podium, unfolded several sheets of notebook paper and spread them out in front of her.

"Oh, is she going to read all of that aloud?" Neil asked delightedly.

"Thank you." She said. "My name is Marjorie, and I'm the president of the Riverside Parents for Safe Libraries."

"They've organized." I said dramatically.

Neil dug through the pockets of his jacket and pulled out a notebook and a pen. "I have to take notes. This is too good."

"I've always considered the library to be a safe place for my five children." Marjorie said to the room. "Imagine my surprise when a friend told me that her teenage daughter was being urged by this library to read pornography."

"Porn-og-raphy..." Neil whispered in a sing-song tone, writing it down in all caps in his notebook and then underlining it twice. On the other side of him, Megan had her hand across her mouth to keep from laughing.

I wasn't really listening to Neil's running commentary, entertaining as it was. Adam was sitting next to Kara in the front row, turned around sideways in his chair so he could watch Marjorie. Kara was furiously taking notes -- even more than Neil -- but Adam was just watching with that same wide-eyed expression he always used when it looked like he was just super-interested in what you were saying, but really meant he was concentrating.

"I think it's awful enough that these titles are considered appropriate for the young adult section of a library." Marjorie said. "But how many parents thought the librarians were exposing their children to wholesome classic literature, when they were actively promoting this filth?"

"Exposing?" Neil repeated quietly. "This woman is such a pervert."

"After hearing her description of the explicit sexual acts in this book -- this book that is shelved in the young adult section, for minor children -- I started looking more closely at the library's collection. There are over 400 books in the library catalog under homosexuality. There are over 3000 under sex. There's another 200 under lesbians."

"Lesbians!" Neil hissed. "That should go in the headline. It'll draw the straight males in."

"Are you planning on writing an article about this?" I asked him.

"Maybe. I think I can do better than Lydia at the Gazette. With my hands tied behind my back, pecking out sentences with my nose."

Megan clucked like a chicken. "Sorry." She said when Neil turned to stare at her. "I like to make bird noises."

Anoop looked over the top of her head at me and shook his head sadly.

"Thank you." Simon said when the woman finished reading her notes.

She waited at the podium, and when no one else said anything, piped up with, "Well, what do you have to say for yourselves?"

Simon actually laughed at her, which was kind of an awesome and an asshole thing to do at the same time. "Oh no. This is an opportunity for public comment, not for a debate. You had your comment, the board will consider your suggestions. Actually, I'm not sure what your suggestion was. You did do an excellent job of telling us how large our collection is on various topics. Thank you for that, it'll save us running a report later."

At the end of the front table, Ryan Seacrest sank lower in his seat.

"My suggestion is you remove all the inappropriate titles from the childrens and young adult areas. The library shouldn't even own some of those. The ones that should be kept for adults to read should be kept behind the desk and people should have to ask for them." Marjorie said emphatically.

"That wouldn't be awkward at all." Neil muttered. "Hello, I'd like to check out the guide to gay sex. Oh no, I don't plan to have gay sex. I just like to look at the pictures to remind myself how straight I am."

A woman in the last row half-turned in her seat and glared at Neil.

"Stop saying gay sex." I said to Neil out of the side of my mouth.

"We want some answers." Marjorie informed Simon. "We've already told the library our concerns before tonight. We're here to get some answers, and we're not leaving until you give us some." The rest of the room broke into applause.

The president of the board of trustees cleared her throat. "Actually, Mr. Cowell, if your staff can provide some answers as we progress, I think that would be beneficial for everyone."

Simon looked over at Kara, who nodded. Simon leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. "Fine." He said, not sounding like he was fine with the idea at all.

"Now." The president of the board said. I couldn't remember her name. I think she was a member of the city council or the PTA or something. "Personally, I'd like to start with the alleged promotion of the titles this woman mentioned by the library. Exactly what were you referring to by that?" She turned to Marjorie.

Marjorie leaned forward towards the microphone on the podium. "I'm talking about the recommending reading lists on the library website, and the books promoted in library programs."

"Thank you." The president said, turning to Simon and Kara. "Now if someone could explain to the board and the public what reading lists and programs she's referring to, I think that would be a good place to start." This wasn't helping me figure out what other board she sat on. She could have learned those conflict resolution skills at either a city council meeting or a PTA meeting.

Kara nudged Adam, who stood up and managed to position himself at the side of the table by Ryan, so he could still see the board members at the table and most of the audience. "Hi guys!" He said cheerfully. "I'm Adam -- I'm a librarian here at the Franklin library, and I'm responsible for the teen collection and programs. I've received a lot of e-mails and letters from you in the last couple weeks, and I know this is really important to a lot of you, so I'm glad we have such a great turnout tonight!"

The audience wasn't having any of Adam's spin on the situation, thank you very much.

"Jesus." Neil said quietly. "Even I want to punch him in the face right now."

"We have about a dozen book lists available in the teen area of the library and on the library webpage." Adam explained to the library board. "They're not books that I personally recommend for everyone to read. I actually haven't even read all of them. Since we categorize our fiction collections by author, the lists are intended to help find books in a certain genre or on a topic. Some of them are are pretty standard lists -- we have one for romances and one for fantasy. The rest are topics that we get a lot of requests for. Vampires have been really popular for the last year, so we have a list of teen vampire fiction."

"But you don't have a list of Christian fiction!" A woman yelled from the back of the room.

Adam turned to look. "No, we don't have a list of Christian fiction. I don't think we have one for the adult fiction collection either. My experience with Christian fiction is when a patron comes in, they know what author they're looking for, and those authors tend to write several books, so they're grouped together. I just haven't had very many questions from teens about finding Christian books."

Then it was a man in the middle of the audience who spoke up. "So what you're telling us is you have a gay list of books because you get more questions about finding books about homosexuals than you do for books about Christians?"

"I don't know if I'd phrase it exactly like that." Adam said. "I think I do get more questions about GLBTQ books than I do about Christian fiction, but that might just be me." Randy laughed at this, and a few people in the audience actually smiled. "Another reason I think it's important to have a GLBTQ list is it's not a subject that someone feels comfortable asking a librarian about. Just because we don't get as many questions about gay fiction or books on depression doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't some interest out there. That's also part of the reason we have the gay fiction book list and the teen resources list on the website."

The comments continued in the same fashion for the next two hours. Not everyone who spoke had counts of how many titles were in the catalog under a subject. Some had lists of titles they believed were inappropriate, with descriptions of what the book was about. It was the same list of titles that Adam had received formal challenges on.

Adam spent some time explaining the libraries collection development policy and how he chose and reviewed books. The library board was nodding along with him. The audience reaction was mixed. Simon wasn't even pretending to pay attention anymore. Ryan was keeping track of the list of people who signed up for public comment while Simon flipped through the paperwork in front of him and occasionally looked up with an expression of I can't believe you're still here talking at me, go away already.

At one point, Scott stepped up to the podium and asked us to remove all the books from the library that weren't about blind people, because they offended him. Then he laughed crazily, like he always does at his own jokes.

"What the hell?" Neil said. "Is that guy for real?"

"No." Anoop and I said at the same time.

Three and a half hours into the meeting, Ryan had loosened his tie, Adam had removed his leather jacket and was perched on the edge of the table, next to Ryan's list of names, and Neil was complaining about his hand cramping from taking notes.

The next woman at the podium narrowed her eyes at Adam. "Do you really expect us to believe any of what you've said tonight when we know you've been indoctrinating children all across the country?"

Adam's eyes widened. "I'm actually not sure what you're talking about."

"We have Googled you. We've seen what committees you've been on and the workshops you've presented at conferences."

Considering Adam was a former weed-smoking new age hippie who spent multiple years at Burning Man, there was a lot more about him out there on the internet beyond his professional committees and presentations. I knew this, because I had Googled him once or twice myself.

"He's a witch, he's a witch!" Neil whispered. "Burn him! Burn him!"

"Earlier this year, you had a presentation at a conference about connecting with gay teenagers, didn't you?" This woman was very dramatic with her accusations. She could have been a prosecutor on a television show.

"I did do a presentation like that." Adam agreed cheerfully.

\-----

“Just promise me you won’t do anything crazy.” Katy said.

I frowned. “It’s a conference of librarians. How crazy could it get? If anyone gets drunk and starts a vicious defense of FRBR, I promise to leave the room.” Just like I had every other time a librarian had one too many and started debating cataloging theory.

“I don’t know what’d you do.” Katy shrugged. “Maybe decide that since you're rooming with Adam, it's the perfect time to act on your man crush or something."

Oh, hilarious. She’d been talking about my man crush ever since she found out Simon had only authorized funding for one room. “I don’t have a man crush on Adam.” I repeated, like I had been for the last week and a half.

“Yes you do.” Katy corrected. “You never shut up about him. Adam said this. Adam did this. Adam read this book. Adam tamed a unicorn and rode it around the lobby today.”

That was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. Everyone knows unicorns don’t exist. And I can only hope that voice she used wasn't supposed to be an impression of me, because it was terrible. “Wait, you’re not mad about this or something, are you?”

Katy rolled her eyes. “Oh no. I think it’s adorable. I just think you should be careful, because if you kiss a little just to see what it's like, and then share the same bed because it made sense at the time, then you're going to have to explain what happened to a lot of people, like your parents and my parents and your boss.”

"Wow." I said thoughtfully. "I'm not even going to miss you at all this weekend."

"I know." Katy kissed my cheek. "Have fun, baby."

\-----

"You're riding in the same car as Adam?" Neil had asked, raising his eyebrows. "Good luck with that." Ten minutes into the ride across the state to the conference, I realized what Neil meant. The radio was loud, but Adam was louder. He didn't have a bad voice, actually, it was just way too loud for one car.

Singing along to classic rock was entertaining for the first couple hours, but then even Adam got bored with it. "Can you even imagine living out here?" He said as we continued on through the rural farmland in the middle of the state. "I wouldn't last a week."

I shrugged. "I don't know, it might not be too bad. You'd probably keep busy, you know, farming things."

Adam laughed. "So, how did you end up a librarian?"

"What?"

"Were you one of those kids who loved reading and had an inspirational librarian growing up and decided to follow in their footsteps?"

I wrinkled my nose. "No, I hated reading. Mostly, I graduated from college and didn't know what I wanted to do, so I went back to school, which in hindsight was a terrible plan, because now I'm massively in debt so I can show little old ladies how to print the picture of their grandkids' cats from their e-mail."

"Those cats are probably very important to them."

"Sure they are."

"So, I take it you didn't come out of school wanting to be a helpful public librarian. What did you want to do?"

I shrugged. "I don't know, something big picture maybe. More technology, I don't know."

"Like David Cook?"

I shrugged again. "Yeah, maybe." David Cook was a librarian mostly known for his blog, which he had then turned into a book, and a series of speaking engagements. David spent a lot of time on the future of libraries and librarians, and was fairly controversial about it. For a librarian, that is. I thought he had some good ideas. Anoop put more energy into hating David Cook than I had seen him exert over anything else.

"He uses the word webinar." Anoop had said when he saw me reading David Cook's blog one afternoon. "Webinar is the stupidest word I've ever seen. Plus, it was trendy back in 2001. He's not even current."

"How did you end up a librarian?" I asked Adam. I was actually curious, since Adam usually had entertaining stories, but it was also a ploy to keep him from turning the radio back on.

"I'll have you know I did have an inspirational librarian in third grade." Adam informed me. "But, that wasn't made up my mind. I was at this hippie festival in the middle of the desert, and I was a little depressed because my boyfriend and I had broken up, and after I smoked a lot of weed, I decided applying to graduate schools would be a good idea."

"Wow." I said. "That's a really moving tale."

"I know, right?"

"I especially like the part about the hippies and weed. Do you use that in interviews?"

\-----

The hotel room was pretty much exactly what I expected. Not the worst place I'd ever stayed, but cheap enough that it mostly smelled like bleach. That was okay, it just meant it was clean.

"So, what do you think?" Adam said, flipping his phone open. "Is six early enough?"

I stared at him in disbelief. "What? We don't have to be there until nine, right?"

"How much time to you need in the morning?"

"Like... ten minutes?"

Adam pursed his lips and changed the alarm entry on his phone. "Okay, so let's say seven then."

"Seriously?"

"Hey." Adam waved a hand around his head. "This doesn't just happen."

Adam's phone started buzzing promptly at 7am. I rolled over and pulled the other pillow over my head, but it didn't do any good. It was already light in the room, I was already awake, and I could hear Adam around the corner, rummaging through the disturbingly large bag he had left on the counter outside the bathroom the night before.

I stayed in bed until 8:00 just on principle, before I gave up and got up. Adam was standing in front of the sink, flat ironing his hair. He wasn't wearing a shirt, and his back and shoulders were covered in freckles. I hadn't ever thought about it before, but I suppose the hair color wasn't natural. It doesn't explain why his eyebrows are also dark though. I made a mental note not to bring this entire train of thought up with Katy, it would only be further evidence of my supposed man crush.

"What?" Adam asked, catching my eye in the mirror.

It might have been eight in the morning, but I was awake enough to realize that asking Adam if he dyed his eyebrows would be a completely ridiculous question. "Nothing. You done in there?" I added, tipping my head at the bathroom.

"Have at it." Adam ran another piece of hair through the iron.

\-----

My morning workshop had been on net neutrality, and as interesting as it was, it was also insanely technical and exhausting, so in the afternoon, I slipped into the back of Adam's teen fiction workshop. My official reason was I needed something fun, and it related directly to my job, so Simon and Kara couldn't complain. My unofficial reason was I wanted to see Adam present.

I had probably already heard Adam talk about the books in his presentation before, since Adam was always talking about something he had just read, but I was curious to see what he was like in front of an audience. The room was almost full, and I wasn't sure if it was because of Adam, or because GLBT titles were the hot teen topic of the month.

The librarian who sat down next to me sighed loudly and shook his head as he looked around the room. "Here we go again." He said to me. "Someone's going to tell us something obvious like they're the only one who ever thought of it."

"Yeah." I said slowly. "I guess there is a lot of that." I had forgotten that sitting in the back of the room meant a greater chance of ending up next to someone who wanted to provide under-their-breath commentary. I was pretty sure this is what attending a conference with Anoop would have been like. This guy even had a Carolina accent.

"And this guy is the worst." The other librarian continued, waving his hand towards the front of the room. "Have you ever sat through one of his panels before? I can't stand him."

Yeah, that wasn't awkward or anything. I looked around for another empty seat, but the rest of the room was full, so I didn't even have a chance to plan my escape. Adam was sharing the front of the room with a teen librarian from a small library on the other side of the state, a man named Alex with multiple tattoos and crazy magenta hair. He was older and smaller than Adam, and talked like he had been smoking since he was eight, but they seemed to work well together.

"Can you believe the outfit?" The guy next to me leaned over closer. "I mean, last I checked, working with teenagers didn't mean we were supposed to dress like them too. Like anyone is going to take that seriously?"

In the guy's defense, Adam was decked out even more than usual this time, in jeans that looked almost painfully tight, a metallic purple leather jacket, and what I think was a vest being worn as a shirt. Alex was just in a dark t-shirt and a pair of really saggy, really faded jeans. Together they looked like half of a rock band.

I decided that ignoring the other guy was the best plan. Maybe if he doesn't get a response, he'd give up and be quiet. No such luck, he kept right on talking, but at least once Adam started talking, it was easier to tune him out.

Adam puts together a pretty good presentation. He was enthusiastic, while managing not to come across as fake, like some of the class presentations I had suffered through in school. Katy would probably point out I was biased and this was just more evidence of my secret man crush, but whatever.

Adam and Alex spent the first part of the session talking about programming and outreach with community centers and school gay-straight alliances, while the second part covered GLBT teen fiction titles. I was right, I had heard Adam talk about most of them before. It doesn't mean it wasn't as entertaining to watch the second time around though. The guy next to me had a comment for every single title they talked about.

Afterwards, I stuck around while Adam packed up his books and handouts and straightened the room. "Did you have fun hanging out with Clay?" He asked me.

"What?"

"The guy sitting next to you." Adam clarified.

"Oh." I said thoughtfully. "Yeah... that was kind of weird."

Adam tipped his head to the side with a 'what do you mean' face.

I shrugged. "He had a lot of opinions about things, that's all."

"Opinions about me?"

"Kind of."

Adam shook his head. "Yeah, he's kind of mad because he submitted the same program proposal that AJ and I did, and the committee approved ours and not his."

"I guess that would explain it." I should have known that if there was going to be political drama in a professional organization, Adam would be at the center of it.

"I sent him an e-mail afterwards and offered to combine the two, and he sent a really snotty response back, so you know, what-ever." Adam shrugged and picked up his crate of presentation materials, balancing it against his hip. No wheely carts or suitcases to carry books for Adam.

"He was kind of a bitch, actually." I said.

Adam laughed. "What did he say about me?"

"Oh, you know, the basics. You chose terrible and cliche books to talk about. Your general outlook on life is all wrong, and your hair is ridiculous."

Adam giggled. "My hair is ridiculous."

\-----

"Oh." Adam said, surprised. "You're ready to go?"

I frowned at him. "There's nothing wrong with what I'm wearing."

"I didn't say that there was." Adam said innocently.

"You're looking at me like there is."

"It's a dinner banquet. You should dress up a little. It's the principle of the thing." Adam was actually wearing a suit. He was probably the only librarian in the building who brought one. Maybe even the only one who owned one that wasn't made out of jersey or corduroy.

"I did." I pulled the hem of my jeans up. "Look, I'm wearing socks."

"Well, bravo." Adam said sarcastically. "Do you have a shirt with a collar?"

"I do have a shirt with a collar."

"It's plaid, isn't it?" Adam sighed. "Maybe people will think you're trying to look ironic. It still has to be better than that thing you're wearing now."

I looked down at my t-shirt. There was nothing wrong with it. It didn't deserve to be called a thing. I was pretty sure Adam wasn't going to let me go downstairs and eat until I changed though, so I pulled the plaid shirt with the collar out of my bag.

"Oh no." Adam said when I started to put it on. "Not like that. The entire point of this was to get rid of the t-shirt."

"Fine." I pulled my t-shirt off and threw it on the bed. "Do you want me to take my pants off too?"

"Okay." Adam said instantly, and then cracked up laughing.

I pulled the plaid shirt on and headed for the door. "Let's go."

There were two older women waiting for the elevator on our floor. Since they were both wearing clothes made entirely from stretch jersey, I was pretty sure they were both librarians.

"I'm going to tell your wife you volunteered to take your pants off." Adam said, loud enough for both women to hear. They were both polite enough to pretend they hadn't heard anything.

I sighed. "I know you are." And she was going to love every minute of it.

The two women were too busy reading something on a cell phone, and almost missed the elevator. "David Cook's is live tweeting the conference." One of them explained after they hurried into the car.

"Do you suppose he's going to live tweet his dinner tonight too?" Adam wondered.

I mimed thumbing out a text message. "Am eating a potato. It is buttery and delicious." Both women laugh, which just proves that if you can entertain your own mother, you can entertain anyone's mother.

Adam frowned at me. Come on, it's not like it was that bad of a joke. "Okay," he said. "This is why you look in a mirror before you leave." He reached around to fix the back of my collar.

The woman without the cell phone raised her eyebrows at me when he was done. "Are you going to tell your wife about that too?" She asked, sending Adam off into another fit of laughter.

Look, just because I let someone fix the collar of my shirt in the elevator on the way to dinner, and just because I may have inadvertently volunteered to take my pants off in front of them doesn't mean I have a crush on them. My wife and that librarian I just met don't know what they're talking about.

\-----

Four hours later, the board meeting was still going strong. Even Adam and Ryan looked rumpled by this point. Adam had explained the library's collection development policy at least four times. Honestly, I had lost count. Neil was even running out of muttered commentary. Shortly after nine o'clock, Anoop had held his watch up for Megan to see, and she had left, saying something about the babysitter needing to be home by ten o'clock on a weeknight.

Paula stepped up to the podium towards the end of the meeting. I hadn't even noticed her on the side of the room. She was wearing her usual pink, with a black velvet coat, and was only carrying one large bag, instead of her usual three or four. Even with her heels, she was too short to properly use the podium. "I just want to say that I love the library." She said. "I love all of the books and don't think you should get rid of any of them or put them behind the desk. And I think the librarians are great too. That's all."

Simon rolled his eyes, and flipped to the next page in the document he was reading.

"Aww." Randy said. "That was nice. Thanks."

Two more Parents for Safe Libraries got up to reiterate that in spite of what that lady just said, they really did want certain books out of the library or kept behind the desk. Ryan asked if anyone else wanted to speak, and when there was no response, the president of the board adjourned the meeting.

"Thank god." Simon said, gathering his papers together and stacking them neatly against the tabletop, like he was on the evening news.

"Wow, thanks everyone for all the comments." Randy said. "It was, you know, it was good. It was good of you to say all that. Nice job."

Simon glared at him. "Oh, would you shut up already?" Randy ignored him. When you've been working with Simon as long as Randy has, it has to be an automatic reaction by now.

\-----

Neil and I waited in the lobby until Adam was done talking to Kara and Randy

"Nice job." Neil said when Adam appeared. Then they shared something that I thought was going to be a hug, but turned into some kind of bizarre handshake-slash-chest-bump. If it had been my brother, I probably would have hugged him, but I guess my family has always been pretty touchy-feely.

"Hey," Neil added. "Can you give me a ride home? I took the bus here."

Adam was heading for the stairs to the second floor, and didn't even turn around. "I was thinking about maybe going out." He said.

"Cool." Neil nodded. "Will you buy me a beer, then?"

Adam flipped him off over the railing of the stairs, but he laughed when he did it, and Neil beamed appreciatively. "Look at him and his purple eyeshadow." He said to me. "He's like the Fiercest Little Librarian." Then he pulled his notebook out and wrote that down, with a note that said children's book??? next to it.

 

\-----

We were short-staffed the following Tuesday, and Kara sent Lil downstairs to the children's room to cover for Megan, and sent Danny upstairs to cover for Lil and Anoop. This wasn't particularly helpful for the rest of us upstairs, since Danny couldn't answer a reference question to begin with. Maybe a more accurate word would be wouldn't answer a reference question.

The library board was still considering their response to the challenged books, and Adam was still working on responses to the original seventy seven titles, just in case. I left him in the work room and took the desk with Danny. Adam now owed me one.

By the end of the first hour, I was already tired of listening to Danny scold the teens using the computers. Sure, technically there was a one person per computer rule, but if there were two and they were being quiet, no one really cared. Danny constantly telling them to move back to their own computer was causing more of a disturbance than the original behavior. This was why Danny should stay on the first floor, where the biggest trouble he could cause was insisting that patrons had not returned books that were really on the library shelves after his staff didn't check them in correctly.

After the fourth time Danny called "one person to a computer" at them, Allison gave up and came over to the reference desk. "When does Adam come back out?" She whined.

"I don't know. Later." I said, not really paying attention. Since Anoop was at a reference meeting, I was answering e-mail reference questions for the day. It was pointless, since when Anoop comes back and looked at the account, he was just going to tell me I answered it incorrectly anyway, but I needed something to make myself look busy, and the questions weren't going to answer themselves.

"I can just go back there and see him." Allison offered. "He won't mind."

She was right, Adam probably wouldn't mind, but Kara and Simon would. I pretended to consider her request for a moment. "No." I said finally.

Allison stuck her tongue out at me. "You suck."

"I am a horrible person." I agreed. "Hey, you want something to do, go grab the D volume of World Book for me."

Allison wrinkled her nose at me. "Yeah right." She turned and headed back to the computers, trying to shove Alex out of his chair.

"You guys!" Danny snapped. "How many times do I have to tell you, one person to a computer! I'm going to kick you out next time."

"Ooooh." Allison said sarcastically.

Anoop came in through the lobby doors. I could see the database brochures in his hand, which meant more information than we ever wanted to know later today. "I've got some exciting news about Gale." He said.

"Is it actually exciting?" I asked skeptically.

"Hey, what's the question?" Anoop leaned over to look at the open e-mail.

"Dinosaurs. Fourth grade." I said, leaning back so he could read it, and watching Danny out of the corner of my eye. Danny was out of his chair and heading for the computers. "Uh-oh."

"I warned you guys." Danny said loudly. "Get out. You're banned for the rest of the day."

"Dude." Alex said, not even looking up from his monitor. "We're not doing anything wrong."

"Yeah!" Allison chimed in.

"I've warned you multiple times about sharing workstations, and you deliberately ignored me." Danny said firmly. "Get your things and leave right now."

"Whatever." Allison rolled her eyes.

Danny grabbed her arm and pulled her around to face him. "Get your things." He repeated. "And leave right now."

"Oh." Anoop said. "That isn't good."

"Get off me." Allison shoved at Danny's chest with her free hand, but he didn't let go of her arm.

"What do we do?" I asked. The rule was staff backed each other up when enforcing the rules of conduct, but I wasn't sure if that still applied when the patron was struggling to free herself from the grip of said staff.

Anoop picked up the phone and dialed Adam's extension. "Yeah, you probably want to get out here," he said, then hung up.

"Good call." I said.

Allison shoved at Danny again, and when he didn't let go, Adam came out onto the floor just in time to watch Allison kick Danny in the shin. Hard. He yelled and reached down to grab his leg, and Allison bolted for the lobby door. The rest of the patrons in the building had stopped what they were doing to see what happened next.

Allison changed course when she saw Adam, doubling back towards the reference desk.

"Oh no, you don't." Danny said, limping over to cut her off. She tried to duck around him, but he grabbed her by the arm again. "Listen to me..."

The second time, Allison didn't waste any time delivering another swift kick to the shin, then jerked one knee up to catch Danny right between the legs. He dropped to the floor in front of the reference desk and curled up into a little ball. Allison spun around and headed for the door again, and Adam headed after her.

Anoop looked like it was Christmas morning and he had just received the best present ever. Getting kneed in the 'nads is entertaining when it didn't happen to you. He leaned across the reference desk to peer down at Danny. "Are you okay?"

Danny made a noise that I assumed meant he was definitely not okay.

\-----

In the end, it didn't really end. The library board voted 3-2 to keep the books on the shelves in the teen area, and not put any of them behind the desk. Adam and Simon drafted a statement explaining the decision, and the protestors eventually gave up when autumn arrived and it started raining.

"They haven't gone away." Lil said to Adam one afternoon. "You know that, right?"

"I know." Adam agreed. "They've just retreated. They're out there, waiting until the time is right."

"Like the shark in Jaws." I added, and Adam laughed.

"They're waiting for that lady on the board to die." Lil said. "You know, the one that's the secretary even though Ryan takes the notes at the meetings? She's like, ninety five years old, when she dies, they're going to get someone on there who will vote with them, and this is going to start all over again."

"I know." Adam said again. "And she's not ninety five, she's like, eighty or something. Someone else will probably leave the board before she actually dies."

"Whatever." Lil shrugged. "She's pretty old."

"Hey, guys." Anoop came through the work room door. "Why is Kara on the desk?"

"I think she has writer's block." Adam said.

Lil narrowed her eyes at Anoop. "And what is up with you lately?"

"Nothing's up with me." Anoop shook his head.

"You've been all... cheerful." Lil said. This was true. Anoop had been disturbingly upbeat the last few weeks.

"No, I haven't."

"You have." I agreed with Lil. "Is it because you get two new databases in next year's budget?"

"Yeah, that's it." Anoop nodded firmly. "You know how I love picking databases."

"Are you dating Megan?" Adam asked. We all turned to stare at him, because that was completely out of the blue. "What?" Adam said defensively. "At first I thought he was dating Matt."

"Okay, Matt is insane." Anoop announced. "There is no way I would ever date him." Then he thought about what he had just said, and then tried again. "I mean, Matt is a guy. There is no way I would ever date him."

"So you are dating Megan?" Adam clarified.

"I don't have to answer that. My love life is none of your business." Anoop turned around and headed back out to the reference desk. Less than thirty seconds later, he came back. "How did you know we were dating?"

Adam shrugged. "She's stopped calling the reference desk to bug you with those crazy questions. I figured it must have gotten serious."

\-----

After four months at Franklin, a job posting appeared in my inbox that looked interesting. It was a temporary fellowship at a college, and focused on online services and social media, with funding designated for attending conferences. It was exactly the sort of job I had hoped to find when I first graduated from school.

But now, I found myself hesitating before printing the application. Sure, I could focus on online services, but I could do that at Franklin, as long as I stayed away from Anoop's databases. I probably wouldn't have a boss who let me do whatever I wanted, since she was writing novels in her office. I wouldn't have Adam forcing me to read fiction I didn't think I was interested in until I tried it.

"Hey, I've got a plan." Adam came back from his shift on the desk and sat down at his desk. "You and I, we should put together a program proposal from this summer."

I thought about it for a few seconds. "Why me?"

"Because you need to get some experience! I don't do presentations solo anymore, it's way too much work, and I did one with Anoop once, and never again."

"I don't know. I wasn't really involved with all of that. It was you and Kara."

"You were involved enough!" Adam insisted. "Come on, you have no idea how big this will be. We tell the story of what happened, we workshop some censorship stuff, librarians live for this kind of stuff, we'll have standing room only."

"Isn't it kind of weird that it didn't really resolve or anything?"

"No, that makes it even better. It'll make everyone feel like they need to stay prepared, because it could happen to them at any moment!" Adam rummaged through a pile of stuff on his desk and pulled out a notebook. "Oh my god, I didn't even realize how good this was until I started talking. Clay Aiken is going to fucking flip when he sees this. We have to do it."

"That probably isn't the best criteria for deciding on a program proposal." I pointed out.

Adam grinned at me. "Maybe, but it's the most fun!"

That Clay guy had been pretty obnoxious. Adam was pretty excited about it. And he was right, it would be a popular program. "Okay, fine." I said. "I'm in."


End file.
